In a distributed systems environment where requests are made from a Centralized Location (CL) to multiple servers, requests may be attempted to be processed as efficiently and reliably as possible. Such requests can be of many different types and can vary in importance or priority. Some request types can be more sensitive to failure, whereas other requests can be more tolerant. Requests can also significantly differ in the amount of time they take to process, which can depend on many factors including the complexity of the task involved. Due to the large volume of requests of different types, it can be difficult to manage these requests throughout the request cycle, from the time a request is submitted from the CL to the time the CL receives responses/results from all the servers involved. In order to process and manage requests, the First-In-First-Out (FIFO) order is typically used to queue and process requests, but FIFO processing is inefficient.
Hard timeout periods can be used to manage and monitor load from requests, where a timeout period is the total amount of time any one request can take throughout its entire process. If a request takes longer to process than the timeout period, the request is typically dropped, commonly resulting in a failure to process the request. Alternatively, if a request is being processed on a server that is unable to perform the necessary operations, the CL would needlessly wait until expiration of the timeout period before initiating request cancellation.